It’s one of those back-pocket niches of the Bay Area landscape — isolated and nondescript, scarred by high-voltage lines and marbled with asphalt to take interloping motorists anywhere else but here. But drop the new campus of Facebook into the middle of it all, and things could get interesting in the no man’s land of east Menlo Park.

For 12 hours Saturday, a small volunteer army of 150 architects, students and design professionals took on this brainstorming challenge: break into teams, wander the area surrounding Bayfront ﻿Expressway and Willow Road, huddle all afternoon in a consensus-seeking sketchfest, and dream up ways to turn this neighborhood inside out.

“Once the city learned Facebook was about to move into the former Sun Microsystems campus, which is essentially the middle of nowhere, the city approached us to work with them to help create an overall sense of place for that part of town,” said San Mateo architect Noemi Avram, who helped bring local architects and city planners together for the one-day design charrette held in a former Sun cafeteria. Not only did architects, artists and landscapers give up their Saturday for the cause, but community members also showed up in droves.

“The key to a charrette,” Avram said, “is that it’s an open forum where the community is invited to provide their input. Design concepts will be developed, but the main goal is to create a dialogue aimed at transforming this neighborhood into a vibrant business and residential area.”

And then they were off.

On foot or on biodiesel buses provided by Facebook, the teams scoured the area surrounding the 1-million-square-foot campus where the social-network giant plans to start moving from its Palo Alto headquarters in June.

Marked by colored balloons, the yellow team took Belle Haven, an ethnically diverse neighborhood that has long lived in the economic shadows of Menlo Park proper on the west flank of Highway 101. The red team headed across Bayfront to the sprawling research and warehouse park, home to a growing number of biotech and life-sciences startups. The green team took the former General Motors property across the intersection, which Facebook has also purchased and where it could one day expand operations. And the blue team got the wetlands to the north and east.

At 10 a.m., yellow team captain Dale Meyer commanded a large round table in the cafeteria, listening to community activists, teachers and seniors talk about their dreams for their neighborhood. Its destiny, they all now realized, was about to be changed forever by the arrival of their new neighbor. “What kind of housing do you want?” Meyer asked.

Rentals? Owner-occupied? Priority for schoolteachers or seniors?

“We have a huge opportunity here with Facebook coming,” said one young woman, “so the housing should be attractive to young people working there as well as to our local teachers.”

At other tables, residents and architectural students from as far as away as Los Angeles hashed out ideas and began putting them down on sketch paper.

“We want to make sure all the voices are heard,” said Alejandro Vilchez, community school director at Belle Haven Elementary. “This neighborhood has large populations of Hispanics, African Americans and Pacific Islanders, and this demographic will continue to shift once Facebook moves in. Facebook will be good for Menlo Park, but it has to take into account the voice of the community. After all, most Facebook employees will come and go, 9 to 5, but the neighborhood stays behind.”

By early afternoon, the creative energy in the room was palpable. Ideas were flying, and images were taking shape on poster boards along the walls. By day’s end, the best ideas would be cleaned up to eventually be presented to the city for its consideration.

Susan Eschweiler, a Redwood City architect on the red team, had just returned from a visit to the old GM property. “We noticed Willow Road has no curbs, no bike paths, and it’s very uninviting. That needs to be addressed. There’s also a tunnel from the campus under Bayfront, closed off now and filled with graffiti. The idea would be to reopen it and create a connection between Facebook and the surrounding community.”

Another “connection” idea was being refined at a nearby table by a subgroup of the red team. They called it the “Friends’ Circle.” This circular elevated walkway would soar high above the busy roadways, touching down at various corners of the sprawling intersection and tying everything together with a poetic nod to Facebook’s friend-centric culture.

David Schnee, an architect from South San Francisco whose colleague Paul Jamtgaard came up with the idea, said the circle “would not just be a conveyance, but an experience in and of itself. You’d create a landmark that could also serve as the gateway to Menlo Park.”

As the blizzard of ideas swirled, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suddenly appeared, strolling nonchalantly through the crowded room. John Tenanes, Facebook’s director of global real estate and Zuckerberg’s tour guide, asked some of the blue team members to fill him in.

“You guys have some amazing views here and amazing access to habitat,” one student told Zuckerberg. “We’re thinking of different ways to make the edges of the campus more permeable and remove the line between public and private land.”

Another student talked about the design of the front entrance and “how important it is to have the community feel part of the Facebook experience, but also for Facebook to feel like it has its own space as well.”

Zuckerberg seemed stoked by the ideas. He nodded, said “cool” several times, and then vanished into a backroom.

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.

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